What Is-or Who Are-the Promise Keepers?
LABASH, MATT
What Is—or Who Are-the Promise Keepers? By Matt Labash Look at Bob Diehl, and the word "warrior" doesn't immediately come to mind. He's a retired oil-industry analyst who favors short-sleeved...
...And, finally, fulfilling the "Great Commandment" (love the Lord with all your heart, love your neighbor as yourself) and the "Great Commission" (make disciples of all nations...
...Coupled with the fact that PK's Memphis conference had three times as many women volunteers as NOW's Memphis conference had attendees, this is cause for concern...
...And of the meager 11 pages dedicated to his crowning achievement, Promise Keepers, nearly three are dedicated to pull-quotes from his wife, who recounts how long it took McCartney to actually practice many of the principles that he espouses during his cross-country barnstorming...
...In this same way, husbands ought to love their wives as their own bodies...
...The Promise Keepers' fixation on prayer is in keeping with a largely unreported wave of prayer for revival that has swept the evangelical community over nearly a decade...
...Then there is Diehl's prayer room, staffed by a rotating strike force of 20 or so prayer warriors (most of them women), with another adjoining private prayer room complete with a prayer altar and three kleenex boxes should the session get a little intense...
...The fathers-rights groups blame their shrewish ex-wives...
...Only a couple," she said...
...But Promise Keepers is so intent on staying out of the political fray that it has no lobbyists, no PACs, no issue-advocacy guides, no politicians speaking at its rallies, and no mention of politics in its platform...
...The pro-feminists blame their unenlightened Cro-Magnon counterparts...
...But the organization clearly espouses an orthodox Christianity which necessitates belief in Christ's deity, virgin birth, sinless life, substitutionary atonement, and resurrection...
...Already PK has more than twice as many conferees— 2.6 million—as America had people at the time of the First Great Awakening in the 1730s...
...He remains unsalaried at Promise Keepers, and last year made all of $48,000 from speaking honoraria...
...It is, at its heart, a tough, exacting gospel, a biblical model of manhood that calls for the faithfulness of Abraham, the devotion of David, the wisdom of Solomon, the righteousness of Job, and the humility of Moses...
...This kind of talk, of course, doesn't cut it in the political trenches...
...According to the organization's own polling and figures from the National Center for Fathering, the average Promise Keeper is 39 years old and makes $48,000 annually...
...Ireland sees the "next wave" of religious rightists fraught with "serious inherent dangers," she told me during an interview in her Washington office...
...Christ" following...
...In its charismatic exuberance (the raised hands, the free worship) and popular trappings (football stadiums, contemporary Christian music), it is reminiscent of the Jesus Movement of the late '60s and early '70s...
...Farrakhan hungered for unity among divided black denominations exclusively...
...It is largely worship, fostered by contrition...
...But here, too, differences abound...
...And while it may bear some cosmetic similarities, PK differs greatly...
...Instead, I read his 1990 autobiography, From Ashes to Glory, which no one will mistake for Jonathan Edwards's "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God" when it comes to literary or theological merit...
...And its only demand was the constant courtship of an onanis-tic love affair—a "menage a moi," as movement guru Sam Keen shamelessly phrased it...
...And most excessive are the receding ranks of Robert Bly's mythopoeia enthusiasts (those mad dancers and fierce-fanged men...
...They are 86 percent white, 5 percent black, 2 percent Hispanic, 2 percent Native American...
...With an annual income of $97 million, and with a squad of 80 or 90 intercessors praying over every seat before a stadium conference, PK has hardly stopped there...
...After persistent efforts, I still couldn't secure an interview with McCartney, who staffers say is focused solely on Stand in the Gap...
...Promise Keepers was founded in 1990 by then-University of Colorado football coach McCartney...
...Ireland has even received calls from women who "are leaving a marriage because of their newly enthusiastic promise keepers...
...The same critics have it both ways, carping about PK inevitably entering the political sphere as religious-right saboteurs...
...But this stirring has incited another warrior, this one of the bomb-throwing, not-for-profit variety— National Organization for Women president Patricia Ireland...
...His employers encourage this behavior...
...Though Farrakhan beat McCartney in actual execution, the concept of a million man march was articulated by PK years before it was on the Nation of Islam's drawing board...
...It's an answer to 10 years of prayer...
...The revival-tent-cum-Lolla-palooza-tour hokum quotient could make even a true believer recoil...
...Secular men's movements (which topped out around 200,000 adherents) are concerned with all things self, like self-discovery and self-recov-ery—in other words, reconnaissance missions for your lost masculinity...
...If there's a whit of hypocrisy, heresy, or general unseemliness inherent in the Promise Keepers movement, chances are critics won't be able to point it out before McCartney gets the drop on them...
...This principle recognizes the husband as the nominal and spiritual head of the family—which is as politically untenable an idea as one could advance these days...
...Because we obviously forgot to mention who or what to vote for to the 1.1 million men we had in stadiums during the last election year...
...More important, the Promise Keepers places a similar emphasis on conviction of sin, repentance, return to Bible-based teaching, a strong ecumenism, and the "concert of prayer" that Jonathan Edwards, Charles Finney, Jeremiah Lamphier, and all the great 18th and 19th-century revivalists believed had spawned their movements...
...And emote they do: batting beach balls, slapping high-fives, doing Jesus cheers, petting aisle-mates' latissimi dorsi, and singing tinny upbeat numbers accompanied by a dumpy, stonewashed house band who sound like they missed the last bus to Branson, Mo...
...Practicing spiritual, moral, ethical, and sexual purity (PK discourages everything from premarital sex to pay-per-view porn "with or without masturbation...
...Even here, however, Evans says that "your role" entails championing your wife over selfish pursuits, getting your family to church, and honoring your marital commitment even if your marriage isn't working...
...He looks up at the poster with the inscription: "Now is the time—this is not a game, this is not a rehearsal...
...McCartney wears tinted Rosemary-Clooney glasses and has the low bangs of a television weatherman...
...It's precisely their adherence to non-negotiable scriptural principles that has caused PK's uncomprehending critics to compare their rallies to Riefenstahl documentaries, to say they espouse a "veiled call to patriarchy," and to deride them as "shouting, sweating, stinking, HUGGING 'male warriors.'" (And that, from The Door, a Christian satire magazine...
...Five percent are divorced, and 14 percent are remarried...
...Still, there is the much-quoted passage by PK speaker Tony Evans from Seven Promises of a Promise Keeper, the movement's manifesto, in which Evans berates "sissified men who abdicate their role as spiritually pure leaders, thus forcing women to fill a vacuum...
...Nearly every year since, attendance at Promise Keepers events has tripled or quadrupled...
...which is why sticklers for doctrine find PK a bit light...
...More important to its leaders, PK has proliferated into approximately 16,000 small church-based men's groups that regularly meet using PK materials for Bible study and to hold each other accountable for the biblical principles that have been expounded...
...his answer was swift and certain: "Because there's no option, it has to be done— and it works...
...I'm not suggesting you ask for your role back, I'm urging you to take it back...
...There is that God-shaped vacuum inside of us that longs for fulfillment...
...This is the inevitable disjunction with PK for everyone from feminists to more liberal clergy...
...it is, rather, a testimony of spiritual reflection and exemplary transparency, the kind of trasparency Jonathan Edwards extolled when he was exhorting his "fellow worms" to exhibit Christ's "lowliness, mildness, meekness, gentleness of spirit and behavior...
...The son of a Marine, he never spent a day in seminary, and so his messages are laced with populist football and military imagery...
...Its chief gospeler was the Chicago Cubs second baseman-turned-itinerant revivalist Billy Sunday, who rained pugnacious neologisms on the heads of the "pink lemonade" church, the "tea-drinking, smirking clergy," and the early 20th-century version of the sissified modern man—"a sort of dishrag proposition...
...One can almost visualize the target reader: the beef-fed, trapezial pubescent, idling in his pew, hoping the preacher wraps it up before Mom's Sunday brisket dries out and the Cowboys game starts...
...He's a retired oil-industry analyst who favors short-sleeved dress shirts with leather suspenders and Puma sneakers...
...Additionally, PK has pledged a million dollars to rebuilding torched black churches...
...My heart is completely for God.'" With McCartney and the Promise Keepers, God may have found His men...
...In Matt Labash is a staff writer at The Weekly Standard...
...But macro-comparisons aside, truly understanding who the Promise Keepers are is perhaps best done by taking measure of their leader, Bill McCartney...
...In just seven years, PK claims to have garnered either the interest or the involvement of 105,000 congregations (nearly one-third of all churches nationwide...
...When this self-described "militant for the Gospel" asserts that he's "an ordinary guy with an extraordinary God," it's not hard to believe...
...Farrakhan's march ostensibly struck a comparable note of atonement and reconciliation...
...its early days, McCartney met with 72 men who fasted and prayed that more men would come together so that Promise Keepers could enact its mission: serving as a "Christ-centered ministry dedicated to uniting men through vital relationships to become godly influences in their world...
...I asked her if I could speak with them...
...Those famous revivals, however, weren't limited to men, and they involved a much greater share of a far smaller population...
...Thirty-three percent have been in the military, and 51 percent have a bachelor's degree or higher...
...In a 296-page book, his national championship and coach-of-the-year honors are dispatched in half a paragraph...
...A real man armed with biblical love sacrifices anything that interferes with his calling as a husband, father and churchman," Evans writes...
...The boss is Bill McCartney, and the place is the headquarters of the Promise Keepers, the Christian evangelical men's movement that has been packing the nation's football stadiums for the past several years and will pack Washington's Mall on October 4 for a rally the organization hopes will draw a million men...
...Speakers are expected to adhere to this theological grid...
...When I walked the halls of its offices in Denver, the personnel looked more pluralistic then a Benetton commercial (37 percent of the 368-person staff are minorities...
...The foreskin-restorationists blame abusive obstetricians and mohels...
...Vats of ink have been spilled on this sensational subject, which becomes less sensational when you actually delve into the teaching...
...Rather, the event's intent is to "present to the Lord godly men on their knees in humility, then on their feet in unity, reconciled and poised for revival and spiritual awakening...
...And during conferences, free or discounted tickets (usually $60 a pop) are often given to disadvan-taged minorities...
...PK, on the other hand, is audited annually, and it includes financial statements accounting for all revenues in its press packets and on its Web site...
...When I asked Diehl, "Why all the prayer...
...They are 33.1 percent Baptist, 13.5 percent independent/nondenominational, and 9.5 percent charismatic/Pentecostal...
...As James Dobson says, "There's something in the human spirit that when you draw near to God, and begin to be obedient to Him, you respond that way...
...But McCartney's book is a surprise, all the more so since it was written in the year of his national championship and before his PK ministry really took off...
...The Independent Baptists, for instance, have passed a resolution opposing involvement with PK...
...But racial reconciliation is where PK strikes the greatest contrast from its evangelical counterparts...
...True, PK counts as friends openly partisan evangelicals like Pat Robertson, Gary Bauer, and James Dobson, whose Focus on the Family has published several PK books...
...Unlike PK, every strain of the last decade's men's movement has been about assigning blame, rather than assuming any...
...It will be little surprise, then, if Promise Keepers fulfills its goal of standing a million men strong on the Mall next Saturday...
...Eight out of 10 are married...
...Rather than tales of true grit and clipboard prowess, From Ashes to Glory is chock-full of McCartney's every frailty, broken promise, and failing as a husband, a coach, and a servant of God...
...It's hard to see PK altering the country's fabric the way the First Great Awakening laid the groundwork for the American Revolution and the Second fueled the abolitionist movement...
...I asked her how many...
...If you're sobbing or throwing up your hands in most mainline churches," says David Mills, editor of the evangelical Episcopalian journal Mission and Ministry, "the pastor will ask you to see a psychiatrist...
...Some critics have suggested that PK's courting of minorities is a cynical media sop and hollow besides, since it does not discuss legislative redress for discrimination...
...Where many see a teeming, sun-blistered mass of male-pattern baldness assembled for spiritual renewal, a self-described "political person" like Ireland can only "see lists...
...Unlike, say, the Southern Baptists, who only recently confessed their antebellum racism, McCartney has made many a good ol' boy squirm by regularly hammering the "sin" of "white racial superiority," which, he says, is "insidious and ingrained in the fabric of our society...
...If we were the sophisticated political organization we're accused of being, then we're either very naive or very stupid," says Promise Keepers spokesman Steve Ruppe...
...Supporting churches through service, tithing, and praying for their pastors...
...She means fund-raising mailing lists, which she's fairly certain will deliver this socially conservative bloc (PK isn't terribly keen on homosexuality or abortion) to the highest political bidder...
...Its ministry has been channeled into a television special, a 3-million-hits-per-month Web site, a radio show, scores of bestselling books, and a magazine with over 320,000 paid subscribers...
...The same passage goes on to read "Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her...
...Speakers often use words like "awe-someness," and it is the rare anecdote relayed without its subject's at some point having "tears in his eyes...
...He who loves his wife loves himself...
...He prays most of the day, every day—excluding bathroom breaks and lunch...
...Pursuing relationships with other men for accountability purposes...
...and in salvation that comes only through faith in the redemption made possible through Christ's sacrifice...
...PK leaders promise "no political speeches, no protests, no fireworks...
...Bly's movement paid lip service to the lost art of fatherhood and the familial responsibility PK espouses, but its only sacrament was self-absorption...
...He also won three consecutive conference championships and a national championship before walking away from a $350,000 a year contract in 1994 to spend more time with his wife and consecrate himself to the ministry...
...The event is called "Stand in the Gap," based on the biblical precedent in Ezekiel of God searching vainly for a righteous man to stand in the gap between Him and a corrupt nation...
...Financial accountability, under the stewardship of the trusty Ben Chavis, was almost nonexistent, as anyone who has ever tried to get an answer out of a Nation of Islam press office knows...
...Reaching beyond racial and denominational barriers...
...But the PK phenomenon has come about amid the same conditions that preceded the Great Awakenings: a licentious society, complacent and brittle churches, moral and spiritual decay...
...But unappetizing as it sounds, what goes on at a Promise Keepers rally is not emoting for emoting's sake...
...Such books follow certain conventions: general illiteracy, metaphoric groaners that equate two-a-day practices with spiritual rigors, and pornographic recall of game-day minutiae...
...The PK movement draws from many traditions...
...Chief among the tenets under dispute is that of "headship...
...But the exclusively black, one-time assemblage concentrated as much on race-baiting and political scapegoating as it did on absentee fathers and irresponsible husbands...
...As campuses across the country were ignited by revival, ex-hippie converts evangelized after flushing their acid tabs in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost...
...For instance, denominational representation lags among mainline Protestants, who prefer the placidity of a restrained, cerebral liturgy sans the vein-opening and explicit Jesus-talk...
...Building strong marriages...
...While PK occasionally succumbs to a huggy-bear mawkishness and therapeutic elements, it does not glory in self-deification but in the subjugation of self to a transcendent deity...
...His rhetorical flourish is all down-at-halftime immediacy: General Patton meets Bo Schembechler...
...those ancient, hairy beasts at the bottom of Iron John's pond...
...So much so, I learned from his friend James Dobson, that McCartney is praying and fasting for 40 days leading up to the event...
...While much has been made of conference attendees' overwhelming whiteness, about 50 percent of the speakers are minorities...
...Prayer and obedience to the Bible...
...Promise Keepers tries its best to steer clear of divisive theological thickets (it withholds comment on sacraments, gifts of the Spirit, etc...
...In that respect, PK mirrors the Men in Religion Forward Movement of 1911-12, when John D. Rockefeller and Andrew Carnegie took out ads in newspaper sports sections to draw men back to the pews by conducting men-only rallies in secular venues like Carnegie Hall...
...of the other 23 denominational affiliations, from Nazarene to Roman Catholic, none exceeds 6 percent...
...By last summer's end, 2.6 million men had attended PK events in 79 stadiums nationwide...
...There is morning prayer and a 30-minute noon prayer...
...Pepper...
...We're trying to reach all men, and many of those men are not right-wing Republicans...
...This is not the seedy, sexy, aren't-I-a-bad-boy exhibitionism of the modern memoirist...
...Give its secular critics this: At first glance, Promise Keepers stadium events are custom-made for media bludgeoning...
...The Southern Baptist Convention issued a broad call for revival complete with fasting and solemn assemblies in the late '80s...
...It's a fairly alarmist tack against a group that claims to have no political or legislative agenda...
...Its offices feature prayer lists and prayer boxes and glossy prayer journals...
...The last month has seen Ireland teeing off in op-eds, on talk shows, and in a propaganda video that has NOW working in concert with watchdog groups like the left-wing Center for Democracy Studies, which itself has seen fit to start a PK Watch newsletter...
...A few PK leaders, including McCartney, belong to the charismatic Vineyard denomination, which is directly descended from grown-up Jesus Revolutionaries...
...And if one doesn't believe in the inerrancy of Scripture, or that scriptural mandates are sufficient to trump incontrovertible political fashions, then discussion quickly falls off...
...Before the march, Farrakhan's ecumenical outreach was marginal, and following the march, anemic...
...Neither is all calm among the true fundamentalists (I mean the legalistic, big-belt-buckled, make-sure-your-daughter's-hemline-touches-the-linoleum fundamentalists...
...McCartney's book is of the Jocks-For-Jesus, as-told-to genre—replete with exclamation points and scores of cliches set off in quotation marks...
...This is War...
...For the husband is the head of the wife as Christ is the head of the church...
...Every day, he comes to work with his Peanut Butter Ritz Sandwich crackers and 20-ounce Dr...
...McCartney has reached out to minority pastors (visiting over 60 cities in two years...
...Programs occasionally feature nerf theologians like Gary Smalley (Kathie Lee and Frank Gifford's relationships guru) who will psychobabble about creating a "safe environment" for men to emote...
...Stand in the Gap," says Bryant of this week's Promise Keepers rally, "isn't just a spontaneous watershed...
...The pledges consist of: Honoring Christ through worship...
...In fact, Diehl says, "This is the only place I've ever worked where the boss comes in and prays for me in the morning...
...But if, as PK argues, the Scripture is a higher authority, then perhaps Eph-esians 5:22-23 is worth a look: "Wives, submit to your husbands, as to the Lord...
...The seven promises outlined in the book are equally demanding...
...Christian demographers estimate that 170 million Christians are praying for worldwide revival...
...And so Promise Keepers is a disconcerting force to those who don't know what to make of these men who stand unblinkingly behind the Bible as the inerrant word of God, and who freely bandy the name of Jesus in casual conversation without so much as an "H...
...Redoubling male church attendance has been a concern of church leaders since women began outnumbering men at services around the late 17th century...
...He was an assistant coach at the University of Michigan under Schembechler until he went to Colorado, where he was anything but ordinary: McCartney led the team to nine postseason bowl games in 10 years...
...In these quarters, Diehl's vocation is not that peculiar, for Promise Keepers is a ministry dependent on prayer...
...PK is also frequently lumped in with secular men's movements—Christ meets Robert Bly...
...They spent thousands of dollars recovering their maleness by shedding heavy flannels in isolated glades to gather in sweatlodge percussion sections, chasing the ghosts of Jung and Joseph Campbell, and finally collapsing in sobs from the collective weight of feminist leavening, from the rape of the Industrial Revolution, from our lack of mythology, and from their old man's picking them up 30 minutes late from Little League...
...McCartney recounts how he failed his daughter (who was impregnated by his starting quarterback), how he neglected his wife even when teaching other men to exalt their spouses, and how he continuously falls short of God's standard...
...It is difficult at this young stage to gauge the impact of the Promise Keepers, though zeitgeist-chasers are always tempted to proclaim any quake of evangelical zeal to be the next Great Awakening...
...She has threatened to "rip the mask" off the Promise Keepers, though its activities to date could hardly be classified as covert...
...But what Promise Keepers lacks in affirmative action, it makes up for in "biblical intentionality...
...It was that same motive that took people to their knees in the Great Awakening, and that is what is motivating this movement...
...There is one open prayer room where the drones from accounting and legal and purchasing can drop in and pray...
...The Promise Keepers has naturally drawn comparisons to both Louis Farrakhan's Million Man March and the secular "men's movement...
...And then he prays—for lost souls, for revival, for the prayer requests that come in by fax and phone and e-mail...
...But in selfless sacrifice, Ireland has shuffled NOW's pressing agenda to focus on the Promise Keepers and the new "issues of violence" and the threat to women's "economic independence" the organization supposedly presents...
...Headship," then, isn't a brutish scruff-of-the-neck power grab, but a form of leadership rooted in ultimate sacrifice and servitude...
...But it gets worse...
...And that's not including the hundreds of thousands of men that have attended over 265 PK regional conferences this year alone...
...And he spends his days hunched in a gray cubicle at a nondescript office building in a seedy, stucco-shacked neighborhood in Denver...
...PK's concern with effeminization mirrors the Muscular Christianity movement that peaked at the beginning of this century...
...They won't go public," she demurred...
...With its souped-up stadium spectaculars and evangelical demonstrativeness, PK has put off many on grounds aesthetic as well as doctrinal...
...And worship, by its very nature, is a humbled expression of fealty—which often doesn't provide a dignified scene...
...The message of being in a relationship with Jesus is universal, it's devoid of politics...
...The reason PK doesn't allow women to attend its rallies is so that husbands are convicted by God, not their wives...
...In his upcoming book, The Choice, the venerable international evangelist Sammy Tippit quotes Southern Baptist Convention president Tom Elliff saying, "Inevitably, revival comes on the wings of someone (or ones) who are willing to stand before a congregation with brokenness and absolute transparency and say, 'This is what has happened in my life, and I need you to forgive me...
...As individuals in an organization, we all have different opinions, but we're a Christian organization...
...Just who are the Promise Keepers...
...But Bob Diehl is a warrior—a prayer warrior, more specifically...
...And come together they have...
...She's noticed they have "a cult-like aspect," that they are "very warlike," that they communicate in "Orwellian doublespeak," that they are authoritarians spreading "male supremacy in our families," that their goal is to repeal all women's rights with a theocratic sledgehammer, and that they are as great a menace to liberty as George Wallace, abortion-clinic bombardiers, the medieval Crusades, and the Afghani Taliban...
...In many of the conferences—when the preaching is good, and the Spirit moves, and one's feeling the sonic baritonal majesty of 70,000 men singing "Amazing Grace" a cappella—the whole place can degenerate into a heaving, sobbing mass of quivering love handles shaking their way out of lime-green golf knits...
...And the president of Concerts of Prayer, David Bryant, has amassed a 70-page directory of full-time prayer ministries whose sole intent is to intercede for revival...
...Just as they do during their less ambitious conferences, attendees will engage in worship and repentance for their dereliction of duty to God and family...
...And while PK attendees have been known to squirt a few tears like the pose-striking cupcakes of Bly's men's movement, its rallies are mercifully devoid of the drama-queen penchant for self-victimization...
Vol. 3 • October 1997 • No. 4
